Semantics of a Pattern System

The wide acceptance of the “Design Patterns” [5] has encouraged experts in other software domains to formulate their experience into pattern format hoping to make it readily reused by developers. We now have numerous pattern collections covering all aspects of software development from analysis to deployment and refactoring. But developers can be overwhelmed by this large number and the lack of coordination and in consistencies among them. These patterns have many similarities and redundancies which may contribute to misunderstanding and wrong reuse. Some research has proposed standards to writing patterns [1] [7] but they were rarely used because each pattern author prefers to use their own creativity [3] which is often a good thing. We propose another approach to address this problem. In each specific software domain, we collect and pre-process existing patterns by defining, detecting and removing some kinds of redundancies between them. The result is a smaller collection of patterns from different sources that have fewer redundancies which reduces confusion and promotes the proper reuse.